What Zionist Jews Need To Remember

From Moses to Jeremiah and Isaiah, the Prophets taught… that the Jewish claim on the land of Israel was totally contingent on the moral and spiritual life of the Jews who lived there, and that the land would, as the Torah tells us, “vomit you out” if people did not live according to the highest moral vision of Torah. Over and over again, the Torah repeated its most frequently stated mitzvah (command):

When you enter your land, do not oppress the stranger; the other, the one who is an outsider of your society, the powerless one and then not only “you shall love your neighbor as yourself” but also “you shall love the other”.

Rabbi Lerner

Ha Aretz (The Land) was granted to the Jews as a tenancy only on certain conditions as Rabbi Lerner says. Jews were not to oppress the stranger. And God also said what the punishment would be for not complying. Ezekiel (33:24-29) received Yehouah's words of warning to the Jews who boasted that “the land is given to us for a possession”, as follows:

So says the Lord Yehouah: You eat on the blood, and you lift your eyes up to your idols, and you shed blood. And shall you possess the land? You stand on your sword, and you each do abominations, defiling his neighbor's wife. And shall you possess the land?
Says the Lord Yehouah: I will give the one who is on the face of the field to the beasts to be eaten, and those in the forts and in the caves shall die by the plague. For I shall make the land desolate and a waste, and the pride of her strength shall cease. And the heights of Israel shall be a waste that none will go through.
And they shall know that I am Yehouah, when I have made the land desolate and a waste because of all their abominations which they have done.

Many Zionists think or assume that Ha Aretz was given to the Jews as their possession, and base their religious and political beliefs on this thinking, but it is not so. The most orthodox Jews rightly reject it. So too should Christians. To be serious, they should be proselytizing Israelis, but that they fail to do. At the very least they should be deterring Jews from oppressing Palestinians as being utterly contrary to anything that Jesus taught. They do that even less.

Osama’s Central Role in the US Propaganda “Myth”

Adam Curtis, in the UK Guardian has written an interesting and honest piece about the death of Osama Bin Laden, and the role he had in the US political world view. He explains that although bin Laden helped to kill thousands of innocent people, the west needed him!

When communism collapsed in 1989, the scare story drilled over decades into westerners—that of the global battle against a distant dark and evil force—evaporated. The story was that of the good guys against the bad guys, born out of the war against the Nazis and the imperial Japanese in the second world war—a just war. Though in Europe few honest observers will deny that it was the Soviet Union that defeated Hitler’s Germany, after the war it was communism that was set up as the original evil empire, and communists became the bad guys in the cold war, first the Russians, then the Koreans and Chinese too, then the Vietnamese, and constantly all those poor countries whose people tried to get free of the grasp of US business. Then anti-Sovietism and anti-communism were academic subjects, now it is anti-Islam and anti-terrorism.

In the confusion of a global economic crisis in 1998 Bin Laden emerged as responsible for bombing US embassies in east Africa. From 2001, neoconservative politicians took what little they knew of Bin Laden to mold him in the shape of the global monster they were now missing—an evil enemy with spies and sabateurs everywhere intent on destroying western civilisation—ie the US. Al Qaida was the new Soviet Union, and Bin Laden was its evil director, a mad puppeteer pulling strings all over the world. What was a minor threat compared with US power was magnified into something meant to replace the Soviet Union in the minds of the 25 percent or so of people who will believe everything that the pro government media offers them, for the reporting of the Islamist terror threat was always distorted to reflect this propaganda narrative.

Neoconservatives, the news media, and Bin Laden were partners in pumping up the threat of a new evil empire. It gave the neocons a perfect myth, in the pseudo Platonic jargon invented by Leo Strauss, the neofascist godfather of neoconservatism—useful lies, in truth—to feed fear to the masses that would distract them from the shenanigans going on in reality. It served the propaganda function of the media while selling plenty of hair raising copy, and it suited Bin Laden who was desperate to seem to be important to his frustrated Islamist followers. The Moslem Brotherhood, a conservative Islamic organization reject Bin Laden as ever representing Moslem views. In his announcement of the death, Obama agreed—he did not.

In Afghanistan, the neoconservative myth has led to fantasies that justify the activity there of western military, and nothing else. The good against evil myth suits the US political desire to be free to intervene anywhere they choose, but the world is no more just black and white in nature for imagining it to be so. Reality has shades of grey and even different hues. Neglect of them prevents a proper critical framework to judge the whole situation and to tailor responses accordingly.

Of course, Bin Laden’s death was immediately presented as we are conditioned to expect—cowardly, as bullies are meant to be. He was reported as dying while shooting at his assailants, sheltering behind one of his wives, who consequently had to die so that the evil master could be shot twice—blam, blam—in the head. A day later, Bin Laden turned out to unarmed and so unable to get off any shots. Why, then, he had to be shot is unclear, but he was shot in the chest then straight into his left eye. His wife was not killed but wounded in the leg, and it seems she was not shielding him. Another woman was also killed, and one of his sons, whose identity changed also. As the whole thing was reportedly videoed, the confusion seems strange.

Bin Laden’s death is actually a serious blow to the US’s propaganda paradigm. Immediately, Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, hurried to assure anyone delerious with relief, that the end of Bin Laden was not the end of terrorism. They need to preserve the myth, and if it fails, they need to find a new one. What will it be? Who will be the next bad guy? The myths are written by those in power, to suit their own interests, and their interests are not necessarily, or even often, those of the ordinary American. America is run for its super rich class. When enough of them realize it, the new myth will be of a monstrous Joker ruling Gotham City from within, and every yankee will be suspect. The stage is set for it already.

Who are the “Mindless” Ones?

UK Students Protest Vigorously Over Political Liars

Yesterday the Liberal Democrats in the UK’s Con-Dem coalition government voted to increase university tuition fees by 100 to 200 percent. Some did vote against and a few abstained, and even a few Tories voted against the outrageous measure, but sufficient members voted for it to ensure a government majority of 21 in the House of Commons. The Tory House of Lords, newly packed by Tory leader, David Cameron, with a load of Tory time servers, will back the motion.

Students are so outraged at this that they have started a campaign to register their utter disapproval by confronting the state, and particularly, that section of the coalition, the Liberals who solemnly pledged before the election that they would not support the Tory proposals for higher university fees under any circumstances. Liberal leader, Nick Clegg, says the pledge was a mistake because the Treasury is worse off than he and his party had reckoned. It therefore cannot be honored.

Indeed, there can be no honor among thieves and Clegg had his own excellent education because he is from a long line of them. His family are among the country’s rich, he had a private education at Westminster school, and went to one of the UK’s best universities, Cambridge, because his father was a banker, and his varied family background includes Ukrainian nobility. He is, in short, not without a few quid to his name.

Now, having joined the coalition government led by another rich Tory, David Cameron, he has decided that the country can no longer afford free, or even cheap, university education because the Treasury is deep in debt, and the country has to fill it and meanwhile service its borrowing requirements—we have to borrow from the banks to pay the interest on our debts, and so we cannot afford public services like free education any more!

The Banks—Robbers!

The students, however, unlike many trades unionists and Labour Party supporters are intelligent enough to realize the public purse is empty because we have given all our money and more to the banks to bail them out of insolvency when they were on the verge of collapse two years ago through speculative investments meant to further enrich already super rich financiers, and line the pockets of their agents the bankers simultaneously, through the enormous bonuses they paid themselves for robbing the rest of us.

All of this done under the innocent and admiring gaze of the pathetic supporters of the criminal New Labour Party of one T Blair, otherwise known as T Bliar, who is now coining it for his neoconservative takeover of the British traditional trades union and socialist party on behalf of the big criminals who bribed him to support the US Bush administration in its greedy adventures, and are now faithfully rewarding him with their spare change.

Students know it, and are young enough and angry enough to want to do something about it, unlike most of the British working class who are gulled into a zombic stupor by a media controlled by the same class of megarich criminals feeding them mindless reality TV, soap operas and a “get rich quick” celebrity culture that blurs the distinction between fantasy and reality for many. The students, after sleeping for almost fifty years, are now waking up to the state of the nation. We are not broke, but we have been robbed in a blatant scam, and the students of the future are among the ones who will have to pay for the heist.

Note thet these mindless students are not protesting for themselves. Most of them will have graduated before the measures are brought in, but the university under-graduates have been supported by many school pupils and students of pre-university sixth form colleges, who know they will be affected by the government class-laden legislation. Class-laden? Young people from poor families will hesitate getting into massive debt before they even start on their adult careers, and the assurances of grants and special measures for the poorest does not impress them. They are sops to get the measures passed, and need be worth nothing more than the Liberal “pledge” to oppose such acts. That was plainly worthless!

Mindless MPs

Yesterday’s demonstrations ended up chaotic, and the culprits are being called names by the media—“mindless” and “thugs”. It is the media pundits who are mindless, and the idiotic MPs who think they can gull the people forever. The students are showing that is not the case. Unjust societies fall apart because people will not put up with it, and the British are beginning to realize how they have been tricked. It is simply that they have lost the will or the courage to publicly demonstrate their diaproval, but students are leading the way.

The students are not “mindless”, it is liberal MPs like the local empty-headed idiot, Don Foster, who represents the rather posh city of Bath. Someone threw a rock through his window, and Mr Foster responded that he did not enter politics to win a popularity contest but to change things. He seemed quite oblivious to the fact that he actually stood as an MP in a popularity contest—it is called democracy! MPs are elected when they gain the popularity of the electorate, and that popularity is based on what they promise to do.

The half witted Foster, reneged on his promise and merely had a brick through his window. Next time, if the electorate are learning anything, he will be evicted. The local MP for this constituency of Somerton and Frome, David heath, a Liberal Democrat, who has had a narrow majority for several elections can hardly expect to remain in his seat in parliament now that he too has voted against the students’ and the country’s best interests. These two and their fellow opportunists will doubtless by then have abandoned all pretence of being Liberals and will have joined the Tories.

Mindless Media

Media pundist are never “mindless”. They write their columns and usually have sufficient ego not to want to humble themselves even when proved to be wrong. One of them, on Murdoch’s TV tried to bombast an NUS spokesman into condemning the NUS organized demonstrations, but the young man admirably stood his ground despite the anchor man speaking over him, and attempting to harass him into slipping up. The demonstrations had been taken over by “anarchists”! It is a general assertion made by media pundits trying to make out that demonstrations are fundamentally vehicles for what they also like to call “rent a crowd”, professional rioters. Quite where these professionals hide or make aliving when there are no riots to lead, is hard to figure, but they always emerge mysteriously when a demonstration gets out of hand. No one ever seems to figure that it is frustration and anger at being duped by professional careerists called policemen and politicians.

No one ever considers either that, it being in the interest of the state apparatus to discredit demonstrations by introducing petty but violent acts, they have undercover agents provocateurs actually causing and inciting trouble. Any self respecting professional rioter, having broken into Millbank or the Treasury building would have set them both on fire, but these professional anarchists only set fire to a few placards and wooden staves in the streets. These professionals could hardly expect to get employed again, could they?

Mindless Police

Certainly the police professionally anger crowds by their so-called “crowd control” techniques. They “kettle” crowds or sections of a large crowd—confine them by force—into a narrow space and refuse to allow them to pass. This naturally causes immense frustration when people want to relieve themselves or to go for food or drink. Yesterday, a section of the crowd were induced to cross Westminster Bridge to escape the kettle, but then were stopped half way across and confined for hours in the narrow space of the bridge. The police are meant to be the guardians of the right of lawful citizens to move along the Queen’s highways, but they wilfully break the law themselves, with the result that violence is the only way to escape. Innocent people have died in these kettles, and a young man needed a three hour brain operation yesterday after a baton attack. It goes without saying that any rogue policeman will be innocent.

The police too are “mindless” because the media are forever highlighting violent protests but ignore peaceful ones. A peaceful “candle lit” vigil across the bridge in the South Bank was hardly mentioned by press or TV. So the provocation of the police and their plain clothes agents might actually be giving the publicity that will arouse the sleeping giant of the British public and their generally compliant trades unions from their slumbers.

The Effective Tactic—Destabilization

If Parliament relies on demonstrations being forever peaceful, and therefore of no consequence so it can simply ignore them, it is making a big error, one it has often made before. The present situation is plain to anyone who thinks just a little. The rich get richer even when the country is, they tell us, broke. Only last week, Ireland had to go cap in hand for a large multibillion Euro loan to bail out its own banks. This week the Irish banks are handing out tens of millions in bonuses, just as British and US banks have done. The banks and their employers, the super rich financiers, gleefully put up two fingers to the world, while the people have to scratch about to pay their mortgages and rents, aye and taxes, if they can. That is why the students are angry, and why we all should be angry too. It is why we should support them and ignore the whingeing special pleading of the press and the broadcast media.

Listen! The richest 1 percent of the world’s population owns over $200 trillion. No need to guess where most of the 1 percent live. Maybe as little as 5 percent of this largess would solve the world’s economic problems, but Obama has just caved in to the rich man’s lobby in the US called the Republican Party, and most of the world’s leading developed countries have bailed out their banks while putting the burden of their empty treasuries on the people, not where it should be, on the minority who own as much as the rest put together. Governments ought to be joining together to ensure the rich are taxed and pay it.

Curiously many, the most intelligent among the rich, do not mind it as a temporary burden! Those rich people not among the “mindless” realize that their riches are most secure in a stable world, and corporate and financial greed is now destabilizing the world. That they do not like. It follows in all logic that the best way to get the rich to pay their fair share towards economic stability is to threaten instability. That is what “mindless” students are doing.

David Harvey on the Capitalist Crisis

David Harvey has had a series of short lectures made by RSA Animate into clever little animated movies, available at You Tube. They are educational and entertaining, and must be seen by anyone critical of our excessively bent system. Jail the Bankers!

The Hidden Persuaders

The mention of manipulating the people reminded me that Vance Packard wrote in 1957 (The Hidden Persuaders) that Americans had become the most manipulated people outside the Iron Curtain. The Iron Curtain was pulled open in 1990, so who absolutely are the most manipulated people in the world now? In fact, the people of the Soviet Zone were not so much manipulated as given no choice about what they could think. They were fed one viewpoint, the Marxist-Leninist one approved by the state, and that does not require much in the way of manipulation, or is the crudest form of it. Western manipulation was, and remains, more subtle.

Nominally, we in the west can do, say and read whatever we like, though, in practice we do not. The range of viewpoints offered to us as acceptable to reason—ie not extreme—is remarkably narrow and skewed frighteningly toward the right. It is, of course, the product of manipulation. The acceptable US conservatism of the Republican Party verges on fascism to Europeans. Indeed European fascists are encouraged by what they see in the US. Equally liberalism is dangerously socialist to the average American. Even many Democrats seem hardly democratic to Europeans used to a wider range of acceptable political options. For Americans, socialism, and—God Forbid!—communism are not acceptable at all. When the whole of the left wing of politics has been manipulated out of existence, what remains of democracy? Socialism and communism are forbidden and liberalism is considered a dangerous aberration from the American Dream that everyone can be a millionaire, leaving the choice between liberalish conservatism and fascistic conservativism.

Unfortunately, the American Dream can only ever remain a dream for most of the dreamers. The reason is the distribution curve of wealth. Unless some attempt is made to change this distribution curve to give the poorer people a greater share of the wealth than they have at present, few people have any chance of getting further towards the rich end of the scale, the nature of which is that only a small proportion of the population are rich while the large bulk of people are close to average or are below it. Redistribution of wealth to the poor means squashing the distribution to make it narrower. More people are average and fewer are rich or poor. For everyone to be rich, everyone would also be poor. There would be no difference between them and the American Dream will have been attained.

It would mean everyone had the same, and the distribution of wealth would have become ideally communistic. Thus the American Dream is attainable only when America becomes communist, and so it is in contradiction with the propaganda of the megarich classes and their publicity agents in the media and academia. The American Dream is a propaganda pipe dream. It suits the rich to spread the fantasy that every American can be rich. It keeps them onside as supporters of capitalism against socialism, but it is pure manipulation. No one will want to criticize a system which notionally allows them to join the megarich, so the alternatives are beamed out constantly as unacceptable and contrary to the American dream, and lotteries and celebrity reality shows let them think it is all just so easy!

And the class of the megarich is largely now a caste made up of the descendants, the kids and grandkids, of pioneers and entrepreneurs who once had a good idea to benefit themselves, and the community at the time. Now the kids own their grand pappy’s earned wealth and have done nothing to earn it themseves. They just pay a little of it to their publicity agents and politicians to protect the system that benefits them. This caste has one idea only, and that is to protect their inherited wealth and status.

Newspapers and advertisers use psychological methods to manipulate public opinion, and now the internet is providing new and comprehensive ways of obtaining information about people’s preferences to allow them to be manipulated more effectively. The American Dream is one such method, an old one but evidently still effective, not least because some people can occasionally find their way through the system into the top class. There they join the old school and begin to sponsor their publicity agencies.

Even with their huge propaganda armory, the leaders of the megarich political class, Leo Strauss’s “Gentlemen”, are not averse to straightforward lying. Strauss’s school of neoconservatives even boasted about the myths they created to keep the gormless masses onside. “Myths&rdquo = “Lies”. Few people in the USA seemed to notice, or create a fuss, and those who did got minimal publicity, so as not to rock the gravy boat. Saddam’s WMD was one such myth, and probably al-Qaida was another, but unfortunately one that dissident Islamists thought was quite a good myth—for them! They took to saying they were this or that branch of it.

The American public are now like Pavlov’s dogs. They are conditioned! And what the Americans do, we all do a little later!

Sounds Familiar: Aneurin Bevan in 1959

I have enough faith in my fellow creatures in Great Britain to believe that when they have got over the delirium of the television, when they realize that their new homes that they have been put into are mortgaged to the hilt, when they realize that the moneylender has been elevated to the highest position in the land, when they realize that the refinements for which they should look are not there, that it is a vulgar society of which no decent person could be proud, when they realize all those things, when the years go by and they see the challenge of modern society not being met by the Tories who can consolidate their political powers only on the basis of national mediocrity, who are unable to exploit the resources of their scientists because they are prevented by the greed of their capitalism from doing so, when they realize that the flower of our youth goes abroad today because they are not being given opportunities of using their skill and their knowledge properly at home, when they realize that all the tides of history are flowing in our direction, that we are not beaten, that we represent the future: then, when we say it and mean it, then we shall lead our people to where they deserve to be led!

Nothing much changes, or has changed, in the intervening fifty years except that Bevan’s Labour Party was sold out to Blair’s New Labour party, which more appropriately should have been called Not Labour. Blair made the Labour party into a neoconservative party, and brought about the state of affairs Bevan predicted. Now we have five neoconservatives, or at least four and an opportunist, standing for the leadership of the New Labour party. So nothing will change. Labour voters have always mostly been dupes of the Oxbridge middle classes. Maybe, it is time they trusted to a few socialists instead, or even thought about politics instead of watching the “delirium” of reality and “celebrity” TV.

The recent vast bailouts to the world's bankers certainly show that the moneylenders have taken over, and already they are making vast profits and, of course, bonuses. Why should they get bonuses for these profits? The Bank Rate is set in the UK to 0.5 percent, so anyone with money in the bank will get this meagre rate of interest. Yet the bank can lend it to businesses, not usually British ones, at anything up to 10 percent, earning an automatic profit of 9.5 percent, or at least a substantial one for doing nothing to earn it. The bank of England sets the bank rate for the benefit of the banks, and they benefit, but what have they done to merit any bonuses? It is yet another banking scam.

Meanwhile, the new British Tory government, with the help of their chums who own the media, like Rupert Murdoch, propagate the myth that the country is bankrupt, and swinging cuts must be made, notably in unemployment and other benefits for the poor. In this way, the anger of the people at being mugged by bankers is diverted to anger at the unemployed for drawing benefits! How easy it is to manipulate the masses.

No cuts would be needed at all if the government retrieved from the banks what it gave them, if it taxed the billionaire hangers on who come from places like the former Soviet Union with chests of ill-gotten cash—the so-called oligarchs, if it taxed our own British megarich more progressively, and if it legislated against the scams and loop holes that the wealthy use to multiply their wealth at the expense of the lower and middle classes.

There is nothing at all complicated about this. You do not need a degree to understand it, yet the British today claim it is all too complicated. One has to conclude on the contrary that people are too lazy to think for themselves and too ready to accept what they read in their newspapers, and see on the television news.

Bevan saw it all, and sadly, the way the Labour party got taken over by Blair and Brown, there was nothing to stand in the way of it. Resurrecting Labour will be harder than resurrecting Christ, so maybe a new left wing party is needed. The Germans seem to be heading in that direction. It needs to begin with a Clause 4. If anyone does not know what it is, maybe they should Google it!

Protests Make Political Parties More Responsive

Latin American protests have caused deaths and national crises since the 1970s, but democratic reforms too. Moises Arce, an associate professor of political science in the Missouri-Columbia College of Arts and Science, has found that political protests, although they can be violent, can bring about stronger political parties and more responsive policies (published in Party Politics):

Many of these protests in Latin America have led to changes in policies and the direction of the government. In some cases, protests may ultimately be helpful for democracy. The established parties may be taking things for granted. Political protests become forms of street accountability. The change that we have seen after many of these protests is the creation of new parties that better represent the popular interests of society, and, therefore, serve as more effective communication channels for political discourse.

By studying political activity and parties in 17 Latin American countries since 1978, Arce found that most protests were because economic policies favored the business sector. Most recent policies have given Latin America large scale economic stability but little improvement from the general public's perspective. There is still a high level of unemployment, and the public has become more knowledgeable of political corruption:

People have died, so it's unfortunate that government reforms happened that way. Currently, almost all Latin American countries have left or left leaning presidents who tend to be more responsive to popular demands and will create a new political equilibrium between those popular demands and the business sector.

Politicians often argue that protests are disruptive and should be suppressed, and that protests are unnecessary in a democracy, but they are happening and have not damaged democratic stability. Of course, generally the political right are ultimately not interested in democracy, only their own power, and many so called Liberals, and even New Labour “socialists” in the UK, are dupes of the rich anyway, so the trend towards unrestrained global capitalism means that “the existing power structure will be forced more and more to directly violate its own formal democratic rules”, as Slavoj Zizek puts it. The Patriot Act in the US and similar repressive legislation laid on incredibly thckly by the Blair and Brown governments are far more dangerous to democracy than a few protests, or even the terrorism attacks they pretend to be to prevent.

People in Latin America are becoming tolerant of protests. In Europe and the US, politicians are getting more and more scared of it. Democracy needs both parties and protests. We have the duff parties. All we need now, according to Arce, are more and more determined protests.

A Better way of Organising our Politics

Something is profoundly wrong, with the way we live today.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

We have wasted the two decades since the fall of the Berlin Wall. They have been consumed by the locusts, or more precisely by the shamelessly greedy. It has been the era of all the Dicks, from Cheney to Fuld, politically “an age of the pygmies”. Unregulated markets have crashed. Wars of choice have left bloody destruction in their wake. The snouts have been buried deep in the trough. Beyond the noise of guzzling, we can hear no moral critique of what has happened, no shout of rage that things don’t have to be like this.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

As recently as the 1970s, the idea that the point of life was to get rich and that governments existed to facilitate this would have been ridiculed, not only by capitalism’s traditional critics but also by many of its staunchest defenders.

Tony Judt, Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt… encourages dissent from conformity, for which there is much to be said. Blessed are the troublemakers.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

[But] social democracy is not something that Americans can talk about, though there is a bit of cognitive dissonance about their attitudes to the public and private realms of social provision… [In the first thirty years after the War] planning, progressive taxation, high public spending and nationalized services brought inclusive economic growth with increasing equity and social harmony. A mostly benign state provided the security for which people yearn, replacing the market’s invisible hand with more visible supportive direction. Maybe all was not for the best, but it was pretty good all the same—and would have gladdened the heart of that scion of egalitarian Eton, John Maynard Keynes… According to Judt, since the 1980s, from Reagan to Bush, from Thatcher to Brown, it has been downhill all the way, with growing inequity, a declining belief in the role of the state and a falling away from civic engagement.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

Tony Judt is proudly a man of the left… He is intellectually brave—witness his well founded criticisms of Israel’s policies in Palestine. Beyond the imaginings of most of us, Judt is personally brave, too; motor neurone disease has left him quadriplegic.

Chris Patten on Tony Judt’s Ill Fares the Land

From The UK Observer

UK Election: 6 May. Who to Vote For!

The PM, Mr Gordon Brown, has asked the Queen to dissolve Parliament so that there can be an election on 6 May. The electorate now have a month to make up their minds who they want to rule them for the next five years.

They should not vote for any candidate who will not agree to:

• Tax the banks to get back the money New Labour gave them.
• Repeal all the bad and oppressive laws that New Labour introduced and are lying unused until some fascist decides to do so.
• Abandon the neoconservative myth of the War on Terror that Blair got from Bush and Cheney to keep people worried about nothing, and pull out of Afghanistan.

If they don't agree, then don't vote for them. Simple!

A Judge’s View on the Law and How to Protect It

Lord Bingham, until he recently retired, the most senior British judge was interviewed for The Guardian by Stephen Moss in connexion with the publication of his recent book, The Rule of Law. Bingham’s last three jobs were Master of the Rolls, Lord Chief Justice, and senior Law Lord. One imagines he is a man who knows the law. He unequivocally condemns the Iraq war of 2003 as illegal:

I took the view which Michael Wood and Elizabeth Wilmshurst [legal advisers to the Foreign Office in 2003] took—that it simply wasn’t authorized. The whole of the Foreign Office thought this… It is not at all clear to me what, if any, legal justification of its action the US government relied on… If I am right and the invasion of Iraq… was unauthorized by the security council, there was a serious violation of international law and the rule of law… It is, as has been said, “the difference between the role of world policeman and world vigilante”.

Yet Jack Straw told the Chilcot inquiry he often ignored the legal advice his law officers at the Home Office as well as the Foreign Office gave him!

Michael Wood drew attention to the fact that the ministerial code obliges ministers to act in accordance with national and international law, so it isn’t really good enough to say I don’t take the advice of law officers.

Can anyone tell me how these New Labour ministers, from Tony Blair onwards and downwards, manage to get away with such cavalier disregard for the law, and centuries old British parliamentary and ministerial convention that is meant to save us from fascists. Isn’t it plain that it does not do what it is supposed to do, because a bunch of crypto fascist neoconservatives have taken over Labour as New Labour, and have done just as they wanted in office. And no one is raising a stink about it.

It is one thing to enjoy parliamentary privilege, which is the right to be able to say in Parliament anything an MP thinks has to be said without fear of libel actions or jail—something irrelevant to the fiddling of expenses—but it is another to march roughshod over the country’s hard earned laws and customs, meant to protect us, the people, from becoming subjects and not citizens. New Labour’s thirteen years of legal flatulence has made us subjects again—subjects of any undemocratic authoritarian government, one that has put in place every requirement for a fascist putsch. Why is no one outraged at the unknown number of super injunctions that stop us from knowing what is going on? Why are students not incensed, especially now that Labour is hitting them and their universities harder than ever while continuing to feed the country’s wealth to the bankers? Why are there no lawyers willing to risk being jailed to protect the sanctity of the law?

Lord Justice Bingham notes that the government is using the threat of terrorism to erode our basic freedoms. He approves of Benjamin Franklin’s dictum:

He who would put security before liberty deserves neither.

Precisely, and that is where we are! Bingham believes we are getting the delicate balance between liberty and security wrong:

Liberty is losing out at the moment. Extraordinary inroads are being made into principles that would once have been regarded as completely inviolate, such as the growing practice of putting material [evidence] before some decision-making tribunal or judge that the defendant never sees. When I talk to the young, I’m struck by how, even when they have impeccably liberal instincts on things like torture and the death penalty, they tend to make an exception for terrorists. They’ve grown up in a world post-9/11 in which terrorism has been seen as this colossally potent threat.

The danger of terrorism is no more serious than it was in the seventies and eighties, probably less so, but the threat to hard won liberties is indeed real! Thus Bingham’s Belmarsh ruling in 2004 was that indefinite detention without trial of foreign terrorist suspects was incompatible with the Human Rights Act and the European Convention on Human Rights. He is proud of it because he felt “the stakes were quite high”. Plainly there are. They put anyone at risk of the same treatment. What can ever be just about jailing, without trial or evidence and possibly forever, someone who is merely a suspect? That is now British law!

Someone thinks someone else might commit a crime so they are confined for an indefinite time. It is the Inquisition. It is witch hunting. It most certainly has nothing to do with any concept of justice. Yet who is bothering. Lord Bingham seems to believe there is nothing to be done to defend good law other than through the ballot box. But no UK party is promising to remove all the bad law New Labour has brought in, and they are all complicit in the neoconservative terrorism myth. So the ballot box can solve nothing. What then? Bingham says, if that fails, we should turn to revolution!

Supposing a government came into power that wanted to introduce a whole lot of measures borrowed from the statute book of Nazi Germany, we would be justified in rebelling, just as we were against Charles I.

So what are the British people, and particularly the youth who have most to lose, doing about it? They have not even noticed. They are too busy having fun, watching reality TV, reading the gutter press, getting pissed, and, like half wits, pretending they are all celebrities.